Weekend Bookworm: Dear Leader

04 July 2014 , 9:41 AM by Rob Minshull

Dear Leader by Jang Jin-sung

The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson has to be one of the greatest novels written in the new millennium. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013, it is a novel made all the more terrifying for the simple reason that it was difficult to distinguish from the Orwellian reality of life in North Korea.

For the sheer mind-boggling absurdity and terror of everyday existence in that huge Korean gulag, The Orphan Master's Son is both genius and what David Ignatius writing in The Washington Postdescribed as "an audacious act of imagination".

Yet reality, it seems, bears more than a passing resemblance to the fiction. Dear Leaderby Jang Jin-sung is not the first account of an escape from North Korea; in 2001, Kang Chol-hwan's The Aquariums of Pyongyang was translated into English and was a devastating story of his family's imprisonment in the infamous Yodok penal camp before his subsequent escape to China.

Co-written with the French historian Pierre Rigoulot, The Aquariums of Pyongyang was an incredible account of how quickly one can fall from grace in North Korea and the incredible cruelty of guilt by association and family incarceration.

The difference with Dear Leader is that Jang Jin-sung was one of The Admitted: as a favoured poet, he had met the Dear Leader, "the General", Kim Jong-il. As the translator explains in her preface to this fascinating book, Jang's story is so revealing because the author lived 'at the heart of a complex and dysfunctional relationship between a system and the people ensnared by it.'

Jang Jin-sung is a living witness to North Korea's persistent dualities between words and deeds, and propaganda and reality. George Orwell's 1984 doublethink is perfectly appropriate as a description of life in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea:

"To know and to not know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy is impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy. To forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself."

As Shirley Lee, the translator of Dear Leader, argues: the doublespeak and opacity of the North Korean regime are two of its crucial pillars of power. "Regardless of whether the world could not see through those facades, or was reluctant to do so, Jang's memoir reveals that understanding North Korea's past and its persistent dualities is the key both to clarifying its present and to unlocking changes to come."

Interestingly, Jang believes change will come to North Korea but that it won't come about because of sanctions or international political pressure or cultural exchanges and investment. Change, Jang believes, is coming because of the unleashing of unregulated market forces from below. The North Korean people are still starving to death and people are trading to survive.

"North Korea might be ruled by a threatening regime as far as the outside world is concerned," Jang concludes "but within the country itself, the regime no longer determines the price of a single egg ... while the [regime] will not compromise on control of its own accord, its authority will diminish as long as livelihoods and opportunities lie in areas beyond its grasp. We must place our faith in the people of North Korea, not in the system that imprisons them."

Jang Jin-sung fled that system, of which he was a privileged member, in 2004. But Dear Leader is not merely a gripping tale of a great escape; it is as much about Jang's bizarre life as a poet in covert operations, faking South Korean literature in praise of the North and Kim Jong-il in the belief that such work would persuade North Koreans that their leader was admired in the South. Indeed, it was this access to forbidden fruits and living his life in a climate of absolute terror that led to Jang's eventual escape: elevation as one of The Admitted proved to be the beginning of his downfall.

Jang is heartbreakingly honest about his ignorance of the horrific suffering of the vast majority of North Koreans outside of the capital Pyongyang. Only after being granted a special travel permit which he used to visit his hometown were Jang's eyes opened to the vision of hell which had been concealed from him and many in the party elite.

"If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself," wrote George Orwell in 1984. Dear Leaderby Jang Jin-sung is a tale that is ao secret to no-one but those in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, those who have to live with a daily diet of lies - and very little else.